Hey, Lewis. Back in high school, a lot of us had 800mhz kenwood radios. We rented them for $30.00 a month. It was awesome since there was not any cellular service back then. The Kenwood corporation did not want to lose their 800 mhz allocation for this area. From lack of use. They handed out a ton of radios to radio dealers to rent out cheap. It was a really good deal and a lot of fun cruising on Friday and Saturday nights.
Man, now I understand the nostalgia. As a car guy that sounds like such a blast, wholesome, and just so much better than sitting on your phone or watching someone else go have fun on the internet. I don’t even know what’s comparable nowadays, cruises organized on Facebook?
Thank you Lewis. You have have a very solid grasp on radio stuff I have been involved with since about 1975. CB, Ham and commercial. Great documentation of history.
In the 80s and 90s, here in Lincoln Nebraska. We had 3 radio dealers. Motorola, kenwood, and GE. Each dealer had their own radio frequencies that they would rent out to businesses "party lines" and events needing to rent radios. They used PL lines for every company and group, so you didn't have to hear anyone else unless you wanted to. My dad's construction company had their own UHF system of surplus GE and Motorola radios maintained by Motorola. Our system had a phone patch built in. The microphone had a DTMF keypad. It worked well. But sadly not very many businesses use radio anymore. 😕
I would have had a mobile phone years earlier if this service was allowed to go forward. As to the $400, Given the nature of all things electronic, that cost would have gone down over the years, still beating the price of cellular then. Most people work/shop a few miles from home, so this service would have fit those needs. No wonder the phone companies were against it.
I miss those mobile phones when the rich people had them in their cars. I could pick them up on my scanner and listen in on their phone calls. “Heard some pretty interesting stuff.” The only problem was - I could only hear one side of the phone call. Fun anyways. Then “Cordless Phones” came out and I had ALL 12 of the frequencies. With a really good housetop antenna the calls were Endless. I knew my neighbors better than they knew themselves. “The good old days.”
it's a really neat idea, but if it was adopted at the rate mobile phones are now being used they would quickly have run out of channels. Definitely viable when mobile phones were still really expensive though. The party line idea is great, kind of like a CB radio. "Hello, I'm stuck in traffic on the M60, does anyone know what going on?" "Yeah mate, I think you'll find the problem is that you're on the M60"
Love the worldwide battle for cell phone systems...even down to the removal of the 934 mhz cb system to make way for the uk market .....Great video lewis
An interesting proposal by GE back in the day. It's a bit more 'ham radio' than the cellular system we ended up with. I often remind friends that their mobile phones are still basically radios! Great research and video. 73!
Very interesting to have a sort of "citizen's band" feature included. I wonder how quickly it would have gone downhill? At least with 40 channels in the US on CB there was usually room to get around the plonkers.
Thanks Lewis. PRCS was a fantastic idea that later got taken over by 9000 mhz trunking FM radios. The 900 mhz frequencies are really prone to line of sight and suffer degradation going thru buildings and trees. The repeater system was a great idea and was effectively a community run mobile phone service. These systems cost very little to set up, maintain and would at the end of the day provide cell like service effectivness at a faction of the cost of cell phones. Cell phone companies later adopted the 900 frequencies for CB radio like performance to each other with any SIM card installed. I tested these and with a telescopic antenna, you could change the range dramatically. On several occassions, I was able to call up and speak to complete strangers who also monitored the radio / cell phone. I forget the name and model but it was a USA sim card and carrier. The phones did not require a valid sim, just any old sim for that carrier enabled it to work.
There was an attempt at about the same time for a system called Personal Communication System. PCS was targeted at large inner cities like Manhattan. The plan was to mount their antennas on the sides of skyscrapers to save money and get better coverage. The handsets looked like they were made by Nokia. I don't know if it ever got off the ground or not. It was supposed to be cheaper than cellular service which used to charge $1 to $2 per minute back then.
This reminded me of a similar low power mobile telephone system that cable companies were proposing a couple of decades ago. Their idea was to mount numerous low power transceivers on the poles that their cable lines ran along and they would connect to the telephone system through their cable system. They proposed installing a transceiver every two or three hundred feet in some areas. This would provide better coverage than the emerging cell phone systems (in populated areas anyway) with barely-visible antennas on existing telephone poles and the consumer units would need much less transmitter power. It would have been effectively a cell service with much smaller cells.
I had Sprint PCS in the late 90s, and its "nationwide coverage" was limited to about 25 km from major metropolitan areas. There were seven or eight of these areas in the US, so th service quickly went the way of the dodo, along with a class-action suit against Sprint by its customers. It was considerably less expensive than cellular at the time, and it offered text messaging and voice-mail before basically anyone else.
@@Ampelmannchen42 We had it as well and were some of the last customeres Sprint had to literally cancel because of the new tech they were implimenting. It was my understanding that PCS was originally used by the US Gov as secure, fault-tolerant comms. When the USG upgraded (to "Motorola NexTel" I think), they sold us regular folks the now obsolete PCS. Then maintaining it, plus competition obviously limited the revenue stream. i'm sure Lewis knows more accurate info than the stories I have heard. Of course walking into Radio Shack and walking out with an analog phone for a $1 (plus monthly contract + billed by minutes, etc.) was so cool and next level. We signed up for the service with the mission to use the phone only in case of emergencies. We also used pagers/beepers back then, which was our gateway drug into this modern day tech addiction. Wow what a long strange trip it's been and continues to be.
I remember reading an American thriller in the early 2000s (written by Harlan Cohen or someone like that) where the characters had walkie talkie mode on their mobile phones. To be honest I thought that was the way things were in America, considering they had free local landline calls at a time when even off-peak local calls cost about 15p a minute in today's money. Not cheap! And BT charged by the "unit" not the penny. So if you kept ringing and getting an answering machine the costs really added up!
@@hithere7382 I remember seeing people use that around me in the early 2000s and never knew what it was called, then somewhere along the line it seemed to go away, maybe when smart phones became a thing?
Actually, NXDN is a thing now; an FDMA digital radio format that's both conventional and trunked. I think you're thinking of Nextel and it's off-network companion, Direct-Talk. 900 MHz spread spectrum digital. You can still use it with a couple of old Nextels as long as they have SIMs in them.
Nobody thought about security on these radio phones, a multi-digit code to access the base or receiver could've just as easily been heard over radio as it was transmitted. It would've allowed anyone with a radio to listen in on calls and we had that problem with cordless phones but it was at least limited to neighborhood range.
Aircall radiophones in the 1970's used 5 tone id, very easy to tape record the input and later play back the tones and pretend to be the user and make a call through the aircall operator
Sounds like some the old long range cordless phones back in the 80's. My dad had a Superfone ct8500 in his car. The base was quite big and connected to the house line with an aerial on the house.. It had an intercom on it sou you could call the car or if someone phoned you could answer the call in the car. I think it worked for about 20 miles.
The Cynical me says it was cheap, simple, affordable and would have worked for most people and the end user would have had the control so of course the FCC killed it. But I also know it wouldn't have/was given enough bandwidth to scale. Maybe if it went digital like cell phones and the modern 2 way systems but unfortunately we will never know other than the few 2 way systems with phone patches that mostly went away when the cell phone came into common use. My dad was an officer and I could remember my mom getting patched through dispatch or the other way around when trying to reach him. I was not allowed which didn't stop me a scanner or radio to listen to their frequencies. He didn't want me listening in case something bad happened to him never mind had enough cobbled together I could key their repeater by the time I was 10 if I wanted.
It seems like a pretty novel concept. I bet if GE proposed the idea some five years earlier, they might have succeeded in actually fielding it, with cell phones even less established then. And as such, this service might have become mainstream, and shaped the evolution of personal communication. This also has me thinking now how this service differed from the very earliest "car phones;" or would this in fact be one example of just that? Very interesting, thank you for sharing this.
We would have hacked the shit out of that mess. I say that as someone who was a teenager in the '80s, and who messed with cordless phones and drive-thru intercoms back then. We'd have torn these things apart and had a lot of fun.
At first I thought you were going to talk about something I had a few years ago. I once got given a 934MHz CB radio, it had a similar antenna like some you shown, the short white one about 2 foot long. It wasn't like the CB as we know it, this one had very few opperators, infact I only ever contavted 4 of them. I live near the airport and the furthest contact I got was on Halkin Mountain near on the border of N Wales. One of the guys I spoke to came to my house to help me set it up properly, on some days it was hard to get anyone others a little better, just thought you might be interested.
nice video with history . GE is a very big company. started in NY 12345. Tomas Edison had shears in it.Then J.P. Morgan bought majority converted to AC became HUGE . the cell companies had the upper hand. I got my first Cell phone in late 1980's . was big with big battery. only ran a few hours at best. We did have some long range cordless phones. but still did not go far. and anyone can listen in. same with early cell phones. yes in the US we have a 900 Mhz amanature band . only 1 repeater buy me. 73's Boston NY
In tne uk that would have been a replacement for the Lancashire Doctor radio service and laterAA radio service butI believe these neede Operstors to connect to PSTN. I worked on Rabbit and never fancied its chances as you had to carry a pager as well. Good job cellular came along
I get a lot of emails, hundreds; keep moaning on here about me not replying yet won’t get you a response any faster! Have some patience and don’t be so rude!
Hey, Lewis. Back in high school, a lot of us had 800mhz kenwood radios. We rented them for $30.00 a month. It was awesome since there was not any cellular service back then. The Kenwood corporation did not want to lose their 800 mhz allocation for this area. From lack of use. They handed out a ton of radios to radio dealers to rent out cheap. It was a really good deal and a lot of fun cruising on Friday and Saturday nights.
Man, now I understand the nostalgia. As a car guy that sounds like such a blast, wholesome, and just so much better than sitting on your phone or watching someone else go have fun on the internet. I don’t even know what’s comparable nowadays, cruises organized on Facebook?
Thank you Lewis. You have have a very solid grasp on radio stuff I have been involved with since about 1975. CB, Ham and commercial. Great documentation of history.
That picture of GE is in my hometown Bridgeport CT
They used to change the bulbs to Christmas colors for the season
In the 80s and 90s, here in Lincoln Nebraska. We had 3 radio dealers. Motorola, kenwood, and GE. Each dealer had their own radio frequencies that they would rent out to businesses "party lines" and events needing to rent radios. They used PL lines for every company and group, so you didn't have to hear anyone else unless you wanted to.
My dad's construction company had their own UHF system of surplus GE and Motorola radios maintained by Motorola. Our system had a phone patch built in. The microphone had a DTMF keypad. It worked well. But sadly not very many businesses use radio anymore. 😕
Dang you've improved you mind control scanner, i picked up my phone and clicked on RUclips just as you uploaded this.
Scary how he’s doing that, isn’t it?
Gonna have to start scrambling/encrypting my brainwaves for security purposes
Me too !!!
I would have had a mobile phone years earlier if this service was allowed to go forward. As to the $400, Given the nature of all things electronic, that cost would have gone down over the years, still beating the price of cellular then. Most people work/shop a few miles from home, so this service would have fit those needs. No wonder the phone companies were against it.
I miss those mobile phones when the rich people had them in their cars. I could pick them up on my scanner and listen in on their phone calls. “Heard some pretty interesting stuff.” The only problem was - I could only hear one side of the phone call. Fun anyways. Then “Cordless Phones” came out and I had ALL 12 of the frequencies. With a really good housetop antenna the calls were Endless. I knew my neighbors better than they knew themselves. “The good old days.”
it's a really neat idea, but if it was adopted at the rate mobile phones are now being used they would quickly have run out of channels. Definitely viable when mobile phones were still really expensive though. The party line idea is great, kind of like a CB radio.
"Hello, I'm stuck in traffic on the M60, does anyone know what going on?"
"Yeah mate, I think you'll find the problem is that you're on the M60"
It's always about the cash.
Enjoyable post Lewis. Thanks.
I never knew anything about this! Pretty neat; thanks for the video!
Love the worldwide battle for cell phone systems...even down to the removal of the 934 mhz cb system to make way for the uk market .....Great video lewis
An interesting proposal by GE back in the day. It's a bit more 'ham radio' than the cellular system we ended up with. I often remind friends that their mobile phones are still basically radios! Great research and video. 73!
Very interesting to have a sort of "citizen's band" feature included. I wonder how quickly it would have gone downhill? At least with 40 channels in the US on CB there was usually room to get around the plonkers.
An episode about the Rabbit system would be great!
Check playlists mate there’s a few on rabbit
@@RingwayManchester I'll have a trawl -- thanks & keep up the good work!
Thanks Lewis.
PRCS was a fantastic idea that later got taken over by 9000 mhz trunking FM radios. The 900 mhz frequencies are really prone to line of sight and suffer degradation going thru buildings and trees. The repeater system was a great idea and was effectively a community run mobile phone service. These systems cost very little to set up, maintain and would at the end of the day provide cell like service effectivness at a faction of the cost of cell phones.
Cell phone companies later adopted the 900 frequencies for CB radio like performance to each other with any SIM card installed.
I tested these and with a telescopic antenna, you could change the range dramatically.
On several occassions, I was able to call up and speak to complete strangers who also monitored the radio / cell phone. I forget the name and model but it was a USA sim card
and carrier. The phones did not require a valid sim, just any old sim for that carrier enabled it to work.
Very interesting indeed
There was an attempt at about the same time for a system called Personal Communication System. PCS was targeted at large inner cities like Manhattan. The plan was to mount their antennas on the sides of skyscrapers to save money and get better coverage. The handsets looked like they were made by Nokia. I don't know if it ever got off the ground or not. It was supposed to be cheaper than cellular service which used to charge $1 to $2 per minute back then.
This reminded me of a similar low power mobile telephone system that cable companies were proposing a couple of decades ago. Their idea was to mount numerous low power transceivers on the poles that their cable lines ran along and they would connect to the telephone system through their cable system. They proposed installing a transceiver every two or three hundred feet in some areas. This would provide better coverage than the emerging cell phone systems (in populated areas anyway) with barely-visible antennas on existing telephone poles and the consumer units would need much less transmitter power. It would have been effectively a cell service with much smaller cells.
I had Sprint PCS in the late 90s, and its "nationwide coverage" was limited to about 25 km from major metropolitan areas. There were seven or eight of these areas in the US, so th service quickly went the way of the dodo, along with a class-action suit against Sprint by its customers. It was considerably less expensive than cellular at the time, and it offered text messaging and voice-mail before basically anyone else.
@@Ampelmannchen42 We had it as well and were some of the last customeres Sprint had to literally cancel because of the new tech they were implimenting. It was my understanding that PCS was originally used by the US Gov as secure, fault-tolerant comms. When the USG upgraded (to "Motorola NexTel" I think), they sold us regular folks the now obsolete PCS. Then maintaining it, plus competition obviously limited the revenue stream. i'm sure Lewis knows more accurate info than the stories I have heard. Of course walking into Radio Shack and walking out with an analog phone for a $1 (plus monthly contract + billed by minutes, etc.) was so cool and next level. We signed up for the service with the mission to use the phone only in case of emergencies. We also used pagers/beepers back then, which was our gateway drug into this modern day tech addiction. Wow what a long strange trip it's been and continues to be.
900 MHz is now part of the ISM bands, which can be used license-free (still depends on the country you are in).
Dive bombing Magpie at 1:16 👀
Yes brother
I remember reading an American thriller in the early 2000s (written by Harlan Cohen or someone like that) where the characters had walkie talkie mode on their mobile phones. To be honest I thought that was the way things were in America, considering they had free local landline calls at a time when even off-peak local calls cost about 15p a minute in today's money. Not cheap! And BT charged by the "unit" not the penny. So if you kept ringing and getting an answering machine the costs really added up!
This was called NXDN and was a thing in the late 90's and early 00's.
@@hithere7382 I remember seeing people use that around me in the early 2000s and never knew what it was called, then somewhere along the line it seemed to go away, maybe when smart phones became a thing?
That was Nextel
Actually, NXDN is a thing now; an FDMA digital radio format that's both conventional and trunked. I think you're thinking of Nextel and it's off-network companion, Direct-Talk. 900 MHz spread spectrum digital. You can still use it with a couple of old Nextels as long as they have SIMs in them.
@@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG Yes! Nextel, now I remember. Funny that such a useful feature isn't common now.
Cheers Lewis Interesting video👍
Nobody thought about security on these radio phones, a multi-digit code to access the base or receiver could've just as easily been heard over radio as it was transmitted.
It would've allowed anyone with a radio to listen in on calls and we had that problem with cordless phones but it was at least limited to neighborhood range.
Aircall radiophones in the 1970's used 5 tone id, very easy to tape record the input and later play back the tones and pretend to be the user and make a call through the aircall operator
Sounds like some the old long range cordless phones back in the 80's. My dad had a Superfone ct8500 in his car. The base was quite big and connected to the house line with an aerial on the house.. It had an intercom on it sou you could call the car or if someone phoned you could answer the call in the car. I think it worked for about 20 miles.
Great video...👍
The Cynical me says it was cheap, simple, affordable and would have worked for most people and the end user would have had the control so of course the FCC killed it. But I also know it wouldn't have/was given enough bandwidth to scale. Maybe if it went digital like cell phones and the modern 2 way systems but unfortunately we will never know other than the few 2 way systems with phone patches that mostly went away when the cell phone came into common use. My dad was an officer and I could remember my mom getting patched through dispatch or the other way around when trying to reach him. I was not allowed which didn't stop me a scanner or radio to listen to their frequencies. He didn't want me listening in case something bad happened to him never mind had enough cobbled together I could key their repeater by the time I was 10 if I wanted.
In the early 1980s I began installing cellular car phones...By God they were expensive
It seems like a pretty novel concept. I bet if GE proposed the idea some five years earlier, they might have succeeded in actually fielding it, with cell phones even less established then. And as such, this service might have become mainstream, and shaped the evolution of personal communication. This also has me thinking now how this service differed from the very earliest "car phones;" or would this in fact be one example of just that? Very interesting, thank you for sharing this.
We would have hacked the shit out of that mess.
I say that as someone who was a teenager in the '80s, and who messed with cordless phones and drive-thru intercoms back then. We'd have torn these things apart and had a lot of fun.
3:15 What on earth happened to that poor discone antenna?
At first I thought you were going to talk about something I had a few years ago. I once got given a 934MHz CB radio, it had a similar antenna like some you shown, the short white one about 2 foot long. It wasn't like the CB as we know it, this one had very few opperators, infact I only ever contavted 4 of them. I live near the airport and the furthest contact I got was on Halkin Mountain near on the border of N Wales.
One of the guys I spoke to came to my house to help me set it up properly, on some days it was hard to get anyone others a little better, just thought you might be interested.
Hi, Lewis. I do not know if you ever made a program about Soviet “Altai” radio system. Could be an interesting topic in line with this program.
Phreaking would have suddenly become so much cooler if this had actually taken off.
nice video with history . GE is a very big company. started in NY 12345. Tomas Edison had shears in it.Then J.P. Morgan bought majority converted to AC became HUGE . the cell companies had the upper hand. I got my first Cell phone in late 1980's . was big with big battery. only ran a few hours at best. We did have some long range cordless phones. but still did not go far. and anyone can listen in. same with early cell phones. yes in the US we have a 900 Mhz amanature band . only 1 repeater buy me. 73's Boston NY
In tne uk that would have been a replacement for the Lancashire Doctor radio service and laterAA radio service butI believe these neede Operstors to connect to PSTN. I worked on Rabbit and never fancied its chances as you had to carry a pager as well. Good job cellular came along
As usual, money wins out over imaginative, but relatively inexpensive alternative options...dang Capitalism...
I always thought the ge symbol was just a fancy H
I don't mind the stock footage, in fact I really like it, but I wish you'd add a lower third to tell us what we are looking at :)
What a shame. A great idea killed off by big cell monopolies. What a shame.
I would have liked to see this system. Cellular did not do a good job of covering some areas like mine.
Perhaps I missed it, but was this system digital or analog?
When will you finally reply to my email from a month ago that you keep ignoring (for some reason)?
I get a lot of emails, hundreds; keep moaning on here about me not replying yet won’t get you a response any faster! Have some patience and don’t be so rude!